He Went to Work

As soon as he closed the door, I ran around the apartment opening drawers smelling everything. I know we rely on our eyes and ears and fingers for the present but smell connects us to the past. The blanket in the library: popcorn and deodorant - we used to watch movies on Sundays in the basement. The tennis shirt on the dryer: ick! sweat – he used to hang it on a table in the laundry room.

Every new drawer was a mountain of memories. His hairdryer. How many times did I stand in the doorframe of the bathroom watching him dry his hair? Surely I must’ve had something better to do. Towel around his waste, he’d run the dryer with the comb attachment straight back over his head. At the end, he’d either get a drink and sit watching tennis or he’d part his hair to the side and finish getting dressed.

My mother's dressing table didn’t have the curlers and alligator clips I expected. Instead, it was modernized to carry what she needs nowadays. Further evidence that the concrete foundations I set my world upon were made of dust and duct tape. That’s not a bad thing, just a disorienting part of growing up I guess.

Take the pots and pans we had when I was young. They felt eternal, like they were the only pots and pans we would ever own. I’m sure my parents have always bought new pans every few years but the years when I was young lasted forever! When I see new cookware in their kitchen, I have to remind myself that it's normal to replace old pots with new ones.

So lucky to have had dinner with him. If he died tomorrow, I had dinner with him tonight. There will always be questions that I want to ask him - I want to spend more time with him now than ever before. As I grow closer to his age, experiencing more of what he has experienced, any chance to ask questions and get answers is a gift from the heavens.

Smile, and know that you know nothing about the world. He’s laughing at himself as he answers your questions, knowing that he asked the same ones for the same silly reasons… Life is a crazy parade.

Three from Flight 27 (and San Francisco) part 2

The first time I ever road a motorbike was in 2007. Ilana and I were living in Ghana, working at an NGO when our Director told us about the “largest Film Festival in Sub-Saharan West-Africa,” FESPACO. We took a 20-hour bus from Accra to Ouagadougou and found a place to stay with some people we met in a taxi crossing the boarder into Burkina Faso. It sounds insane now, three years later, to say that we quite literally hopped on a bus in Ghana with no set plans or preparation for lodging or the road home, but that's pretty much exactly how it happened.

In addition to the amazing food (Burkina Faso is a former French Colony) everyone owned a two-wheeled something or other. Bicycles, mopeds, motorbikes, motorcycles… it was dizzying to watch the traffic race by, Muslim garb dancing behind the riders.

Naturally, I had to get my hands on one. We found someone to loan me his bike for a few days in exchange for an absurdly small fee. With a top speed of forty or fifty miles an hour and a marijuana leaf sticker pealing off the front, you’d never guess that it had the heart of a Harley. Riding the bike, we explored all that the Film Festival had to offer: Films (obviously) cafés, West-African grub, and an enormous crafts market. At every outlet, there was hundreds and hundreds of bikes parked next to each other. It was paradise surrounded by the Sahara.

One night, on our way home, we decided to ride around a lake near the house we were staying in. I opened the throttle as wide as I could - racing us through cool air from the lake. A boy riding a motorbike with his girlfriend’s arms locked around his waste at midnight next to a lake in West Africa.

In love?

Last Saturday, at 7:30 a.m., I held the front brake of a Suzuki such-and-such 250 and swung my leg over the saddle. It had started pouring the day before and wasn't going to stop anytime soon. Worse than the rain, the wind lurched up in gusts strong enough to knock over the porto-potty at one end of the vacant lot. Although waterproof rain-gear covered my entire body, the water quickly soaked my hands and feet and then climbed my arms and legs towards my chest. Whenever we were lined up, I hunched over the gas tank and touched the engine block with my gloved-hands to keep them from going numb. We rode for about four hours, barely going above ten or twelve mph, learning how to manipulate the clutch, throttle and brakes.

In love.

One thing I hate; one thing I love

I hate when a rockstar complains... about anything. Rumor has it, Neil Peart complains about shows, band members and his riding buddies throughout his three books about motorcycling, travel and music. Really? I mean, really? If you don't like it, don't do it! But to sit inside a 360° drum kit in front of thousands of fans and piss and moan about it? He wrote the lyrics for most of the songs the fans are singing along to.. and he's upset? What a douche.

I have a fantastic record player, as I've mentioned a few times. And I've got some fantastic records. One album that isn't so fantastic is one of my dad's old Howlin' Wolfe records. The music is amazing, but the record itself is in rough shape. As he and I were driving around San Diego last week, I told him he had played it out. He laughed and said, "Oh yeah, I played that one plenty of times. Plenty of times drunk, too." My dad is about as cool and collected as they come so the image of him stumbling over to the record player, attempting to massage the disc onto the plate, scraping the needle across the surface, and then stumbling back, closing his eyes, ripping air guitar moves, all at three a.m... it's priceless.

Three from Flight 27 (and San Francisco) part 1

Every Friday, junior year of high school, I drove straight home at three o’clock after a week of class, rehearsals, practices and nagging teachers. As soon as I turned the lock on the kitchen door, my dog would go nuclear and practically piss herself with anticipation of, well, going to the bathroom. I grabbed her leash, tossed my bag on the counter, and ran her around the block as fast as I could.

Coco inside, water-bowl filled, money in my pocket? Check, check and check. Diving back into the car, I blasted the radio and drove north on I-87. Usually, the traffic would back up miles before the Tapan Zee bridge and I’d have time to review whatever I was supposed to have practiced the week before – A Nirvana tune, a Chilli Peppers tune, a Police tune.

Finally, head bouncing with anticipation, I drove down my drum teacher's driveway, grabbed my sticks off the passenger seat and headed into his basement. The smell of stale cigarettes still comforts me years later. We would sit side by side, striking a drum pad to a metronome, perfecting technique and warming up for the main event: playing the kit along to rock and roll. His drums were loud and obnoxious and he had me playing with tree trunks to get all the power I could out of them.

Our lesson was supposed to last an hour but I usually stayed for two or three. He’d show me more tracks to learn and beats to play; we’d talk about drumming philosophy and try to justify our mutual obsession with the instrument.

Around six or seven o’clock, I would drive home with no traffic. The drive home only took about forty-five minutes. Anything I put in the CD player sounded amazing after my musical neurons had been ignited all afternoon but one time, the amazing happened. I started “Dark Side of the Moon” in my teacher’s driveway and as the closing heartbeat faded away, I pulled into my own driveway. I couldn’t move for a half hour. It was as though my life was choreographed and had an amazing soundtrack and all I had to do was keep playing, keep drumming and keep studying music.

Fast forward nine years and we are standing in the doorway of my apartment after our last show. It had been raining to that Eeyore point where everything indoors was damp and moldy. Any person you spoke to was wet, tired and grouchy. And the gig? The stage monitors were lousy (venue’s fault), I brought the wrong snare drum (my fault), and the room had barely enough people to cover the club’s overhead. You have to laugh as you say it out loud: We made $5.00 from the door that night. Our lead singer almost missed the show and I played like shit for no discernable reason. It was a rough night to say the least.

In love.

The War Below

Every day, every few minutes: battle.

It is not a balanced fight. Each time the opposing sides rush each other, there is a strong faction and a weak one. I am not King Leonidas but I encourage the morale of my fellow warriors. It’s a subtle game: showing strength in the face of unavoidable destruction.

Wave after wave of enemies flood the turn and if you’re not careful, if you’re not quick and cunning, you may get beaten twice in one morning. The riders above show no mercy. Their strength is the inertia of their numbers.

Until Spring unveils her bosom of light, we will remain below; trapped in this frozen anus jockeying for the best position on the transport vessels to another battle in another station.

Oh, but if I could only cry out to both sides! I would join them in an alliance worthy of the majestic underground pythons we ride so thanklessly. It does not have to be this way! We could form lines and be patient and maybe even delay the train from leaving without our fellow man………

A dream that will never be made manifest.

I Don't Look That Old

A guy at the deli used to sell me beer in high school – I wasn’t tall enough to put the money on the counter yet there he was, filling my prescription. He’d charge me like twenty bucks for a sixer of bud light or something and I’d go off into the woods with eighteen friends and sip it down and… wow, I’m off track.

So on a Monday, I’m rested and happy. Usually, I spent the weekend taking long showers and sleeping in. By Thursday, I’m seven different seasons of exhausted and the only color in my cheeks is reflected off the dried coffee stains on my shirt. This particular Thursday, I left work around 8:00. God hates me for missing Ash Wednesday.

As I trudged home from the subway, cold air slapping my beard, tugging my tie, I turned into the market to do my grocery shopping: a quart of whole milk, a six-pack of bud light and a can of tuna. Two people have that grocery list: crack-heads and musicians. Holding cash, expending all of my energy to stay vertical, I heard the guy at the register whisper into a pillow at the other end of a tunnel. “Sorry?” I said. And he said, “I.D.?” Thoughts lined up in my head:

Was he talking to me? And for that matter, where was I?

Look down at my items to make sure he was ID-ing me for some sort of weapon: A gun or perhaps a Samurai sword. Nope, just a can of tuna, a quart of milk and some bud light.

Oh! The bud light! Shit. Right.

Wait a second; it’s nine-thirty on a Thursday night. Does he think I’m going to somehow make amphetamines out of my groceries and smoke them behind the gymnasium before calculus?

Dude, gimme my fucking tuna and bud light so that I can eat dinner and cry myself to sleep listening to old Cranberries albums, wake up, dump the milk into a carafe of coffee and go back to work.

A half-groan, half-sigh. It’s alright, I get it: Despite my vibe, my rhythm, half-wearing a tie and fully wearing exhaustion, I just don’t look that old.